This is unbelievable if true. Why has nobody thought of tweeting from prison before? It's genius. Is there anything the government can legally do to prevent this from happening? Do you have the right to freely distribute your thoughts while incarcerated?
If there were more prison twitter accounts it would do wonders towards expsosing how absurd our judicial / prison system is. More people should be live tweeting court cases / prison sentences. Could Adnan Syed have done companion tweets to the Serial podcast? This idea is so interesting.
A lot of prisoners have no access to the outside world, including the internet. Many prisons lack even a basic library. Inmates working with The Last Mile (http://thelastmile.org/) tweet by passing their tweets written on paper to volunteers who actually enter them.
Prisoners can only communicate with the outside world through monitored communications to protect the victims of their crimes as well as prevent prisoners from ordering criminal activity from behind bars. When you are a prisoner, you lose the right to private communications. It's prison, not summer camp. What 'right' does a prisoner have to Facebook? None. You might want to learn about why policies are the way they are before blindly complaining about 'injustice.' There have been numerous cases where witness retaliations have been arranged from prison; victim harassment is also common. That's why communications are monitored. Besides, why do we care? Facebook isn't some kind of human right. It's a superfluous luxury. If prisoners want to communicate, they have access to pen and paper. They have access to phone calls. This is far cry from fully-isolated solitary confinement with no communications at all. We're complaining about FACEBOOK for god's sake. What next, complaining that prisoners don't have access to Freshdirect or Uber?
What mirderers haven't been charged that you're referring too? Ferguson was a clear case of self defense; you attack a cop, you will get put down. How is that even controversial? Don't attack cops. Common sense. In Baltimore, those cops were charged. As far as murder, do you know what the legal definition of murder is? How about manslaughter? How about intent? You're obviously not a lawyer. I'm interested in if you are outraged that Dorian Johnson hasn't yet been charged for obstruction of justice for lying to the police about brown being shot in the back? How about his claim that Brown was running away? If you want justice, then Dorian needs to be charged. But I don't think you care about actual justice. You just like jumping on the anti-cop, everyone is racists bandwagon. Facts apparently aren't as important as smashing windows and starting riots over imagined injustices. The Baltimore guy had been arrested dozens of times. Why do we care about him and not the 28 people shot in Chicago almost every weekend? Do you even know the name of a single shooting victim from last weekend in Chicago? Where's their justice? Perhaps you should care about justice for the victims of crime rather than the perpetrators of it. But ok, let's worry about Facebook for prisoners; that's totally important.
Why are inmates not allowed to use the internet? I can understand drug kingpins or gang leaders being prevented from using it to stop them from forming plans or whatever, but for your run of the mill inmate who does not have a bunch of goons to do his bidding, what's the problem?
Obviously there's some nuance as to whether Soundcloud is social media, but the bigger point is that prisons want to control inmates' ability to communicate
While profiting off inmates may seem predatory to some extent, it does offer a service that was not there before the dotcom age.
When we look at prison communication back in the day, it was through locally wired telephone systems. The loved one or family member had to physically be present to speak to the person, but with technology something like an ekiosk (essentially the same types you see at newer airports, olive garden, etc), this does not have to be the case. You can be halfway across the world and still have more than just a phone call with someone who is incarcerated using the internet.
Prison phones are a commodity but now it seems to be legalized in a sense with this type of kiosk gateway for buying news, watching TV shows, etc.
I've done a bit of work with prisons before, the restrictions for equipment inside of it are absurd. Everything is considered a weapon in prison. I can only imagine the amount of censorship involved with this gateway though, its like bigbrother 1984
This is now interesting. Apparently prisoners in the US and many other countries are not allowed to have Internet access. In the US there is a system in place that allows inmates to communicate text only emails. I don't think you can call that plain text messaging "the Internet" in 2017.
With this supreme court ruling, how prisons in the US are going to allow inmates to have access to the real Internet? I mean you can not ban those inmates from accessing the Internet, right?
I understand the need to monitor communication in prisons I mean you never know how a drug dealer will give commands to his gang but seriously this guy is not a drug dealer.
He should be allowed to communicate with the outside world unless the prison has something to hide. (See that logic works backwards as well)
We are so used to the government telling us our communication should be monitored unless we have something to hide but how about we apply that to them.
I recently read an article about prisoners who had cell phones from which they posted to their Facebook pages, replete with images of their drugs and snack stashes, even facilitating communications between inmates in different prisons.
It was only after investigative journalists brought the situation to the attention of regulatory agencies that the prisons clamped down on the security breaches within the prisons.
> The situation may not be perfect today, but communication to/from prisons are heavily guarded to prevent these situations and others.
That's pretty funny. Contraband cell phones are ridiculously common in prison. I had a buddy of mine in prison, was there for four years. At one point he started calling me from jail, from a contraband phone.
He called me often enough and we chatted long enough on these calls that I got the feeling that there wasn't any sort of real scarcity when it comes to communications in prison.
The phones had Internet access, he would update his Facebook page from prison. At one point he even asked me for money so that he could buy his own contraband cell phone. (I said no)
If there were more prison twitter accounts it would do wonders towards expsosing how absurd our judicial / prison system is. More people should be live tweeting court cases / prison sentences. Could Adnan Syed have done companion tweets to the Serial podcast? This idea is so interesting.
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